In Defense of 'Luxury Beliefs'

Historically, many ideas that once seemed to be elite fixations eventually became mainstream.

"Luxury beliefs" are the ideological equivalent of an icy tray of Blue Point oysters—trendy, expensive, and often impractical for the average person, but deeply satisfying for those who can afford them. And, on rare occasions, sickening.

The term, coined by writer Rob Henderson, describes a set of ideas that he believes confer status on elites while imposing costs on everyone else. In his accounting, these include: academic elites advocate prison abolition while living in low-crime neighborhoods; Silicon Valley billionaires declare that college is a scam, ignoring the elite-education connections that got them their first venture capital meetings; and urban intellectuals claim homeownership is overrated—right up until they buy a brownstone in Brooklyn.

While this critique is more often levied against progressives, luxury beliefs are fascinatingly transpartisan. Like "virtue signaling" before it, the term is often used too loosely, simply indicating a set of beliefs with which the speaker disagrees and would like to associate with a villainous or hypocritical overdog.

But what if luxury beliefs—frivolous, far-fetched, and sometimes downright wrong—actually serve a useful function? What if they're not (or not only) a maladaptive status signal, but also a mechanism by which new ideas emerge, social status gets reshuffled, and intellectual progress happens?

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Perhaps luxury beliefs function as a
kind of social R&D department. The powerful and well-insulated play around with new norms, experiment with weird ideas, and sometimes—accidentally?—stumble into something valuable. It's an expensive and often inefficient process, but so is most innovation.

Another way of understanding the way this process works with beliefs is to examine how it happens with stuff. Many essentials of modern life—indoor plumbing, refrigeration, cellphones—began as indulgences available only to the wealthy. Over time, markets and technology transformed these once-extravagant luxuries into affordable, widely available necessities. It's not unreasonable to think that some of today's elite-only beliefs about governance, education, or social structures might go through a similar process, becoming first popular, then normalized, then indispensable.

Just as with luxury goods, the democratization of ideas can be unpredictable. The first automobiles were expensive playthings for the rich before Henry Ford figured out how to mass-produce them for the everyman. Alternatives to eating meat have gone from being expensive and inconvenient to being widely available for those who want them. What starts as a status flex can turn into a social good.

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Historically, many ideas that once seemed to be eccentric elite fixations eventually became mainstream. Some of them fundamentally improved human civilization. The abolition of slavery, religious tolerance, gay rights, free markets—each of these can trace at least part of their genealogy to a fringe belief held by a small, educated, and often elite minority before gaining wider acceptance.

In the early 19th century, abolitionists were often portrayed as disconnected from the broader populace's economic interests and social norms. Critics argued that their calls for immediate emancipation threatened the established economic order. George Fitzhugh, one of history's truly grotesque antiabolitionists and one of President Abraham Lincoln's least favorite people, wrote of the dire consequences of "liberty and equality" in 1854's Sociology for the South. "Crime and pauperism have increased. Riots, trades unions, strikes for higher wages, discontent breaking out into revolution, are things of daily occurrence, and show that the poor see and feel quite as clearly as the philosophers, that their condition is far worse under the new than under the old order of things."

What's more, abolitionists were often entangled with other radical movements, such as the promotion of women's independence and the questioning of traditional marriage norms, which further alienated them from mainstream society. Critics viewed them as extremists pushing a broad agenda that threatened foundational structures for dubious and unequally distributed gains—the very charge levied against today's luxury belief holders.

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Elites have always found ways to distinguish themselves from the masses. In the past, this meant flaunting physical wealth, hereditary titles, or exclusive access to power. Today, perhaps the preferred
markers of status are more moral and intellectual. Ideas can be debated, challenged, and refined. Social norms shift, and bad ideas tend to die out. (Or at least, they become passé enough that the elites drop them for new, more fashionable bad ideas.) Compared to the rigid hierarchies of the past, a world where status is earned by posting counterintuitive takes on X is
an improvement.

As someone who holds many (though certainly not all) of the views Henderson classes as luxury beliefs, I'd quibble with his description of the mechanism by which they operate. I'm quite sure consistent advocacy for wholesale drug legalization has not resulted in status gains for me personally. I don't see a clear path whereby my defense of more creative domestic and sexual arrangements is convincing the American public at large to move away from traditional family structures, a project that was already well underway. And—most importantly—it's a matter of debate whether less college attendance or homeownership would, in fact, be a disservice to society at large or the less well off.

The obvious problem with luxury beliefs is when they quickly zoom from experimental to mandatory. It's one thing for Elon Musk to pilot alternative family structures—it's another when policies based on those theories get imposed on people with far fewer resources to absorb the risks. (This applies equally to luxury beliefs of the left and the right.) But even bad ideas serve a purpose: They pressure-test existing norms. And sometimes, the craziest ideas turn out to be right.

If we dismissed every idea that originated in an elite bubble, we'd lose the good along with the bad. Today's luxury belief could be tomorrow's common sense. An open society benefits from experimentation, even when it's annoying.

Not every outré idea is the moral equivalent of abolitionism, of course. Eugenicists were subject to many of the same criticisms, and were deeply harmful to the body politic. But a bad oyster is not a reason to eschew all bivalves as a source of fun and protein. It is a warning to carefully vet your suppliers of oysters and ideas, and to make sure they pass the sniff test before you swallow them.